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Comment by danilocesar | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me that fateful question that we, software engineers, use to hear from our moms/dads/family: "Why don't you start a facebook?"

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Used to work for an agency where we often had people asking us to build their grand new idea.

There would be NDAs and lawyers and dire warnings of secrecy until we finally got to the bottom of what they wanted. Basically Facebook or Google, but on a budget of about 50p and the vague offer of some stock.

Unsurprisingly, we’d tell them where to go.

I worked on a project where it had been outsourced before we got it - the original requirements were to copy an existing system but make it look like facebook.

It was a disaster :)

This amuses me to no end, I have never got that question, the closest thing was "you do websites right? do you know how to hack someone's Facebook?"

Or even "can you fix my printer?"

Haha classic. For me that'd be: "I've got an app idea."

I got this one from one of my mates in school: "Can you please install Gentoo on my toaster?"

I've heard this a few times. I know some friends had this question too. There are some variance, but the context is the same: "Look this guy, he started facebook when he was 19 and he's now a billionaire, why don't you try the same?"

Maybe it's my social context...

I run an email security business, we do fraud prevention and monitoring for businesses and brands. I get multiple inquiries a week to "hack a mailbox"...

I get sent articles with stories like '16 year old creates app, becomes millionaire' with the email title 'you make apps, don't you? So I have an idea...'. And yes, also, at every birthday party; 'can you hack into blah and deface that fraud, because he scammed me!'.

the "can you hack X" I get most often. But also questions to help with random programs I sometimes never even heard of, that they use at their job or whatever :D

Can be a lot worse, the CEO in a company I used to work at asked a group of IT people why are you guys not successful like WhatsApp, you are the same number of people (it was just after their exit)? None of the people in the room were employed as a developer. This was a first meeting of the group with the new CEO.

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